E3 2004: Miyamoto and Aonuma on Zelda

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The two Legend of Zelda producers answer questions about the game.

By IGN Staff

After the Electronics Entertainment Expo 2004 shut down Wednesday night, Nintendo® held a private roundtable that focused on its upcoming GameCube adventure The Legend of Zelda. The game's producers Shigeru Miyamoto and Eiji Aonuma talked about the project and then fielded questions from the press. While the two remained tightlipped about the story and theme of the game, some new details were released all the same.

Tom Harlin, Nintendo® of America: I'd like to begin by introducing ourspeakers. This is my co-host, Bill Trinen from Nintendo® of America. Hewill serve as the translator for this event. Next we have someone thatneeds no introduction, Mr. Miyamoto. Beside him is Mr. Tezuka, and Mr.Konno. They will each start by giving a small introduction aboutessentially who they are and their work at Nintendo®. We'll start withMr. Miyamoto.

Shigeru Miyamoto: Good evening. I'll be speaking Japanese tonight.[laughs]. I would like to thank so many of you for joining us heretonight. Mostly we're going to be talking about the Nintendo® DS and thenew Zelda game. But first there's something I'd like to clear up. I'veheard that some of you have heard that my heart is doing so well thesedays. Is there a rumor going around? [Laughs] There are rumors goingaround that I've actually quit Nintendo®? At least, that's the rumorgoing on over in Japan right now. [laughs] At the hotel yesterday I hada good kilometer swim, and my heart's doing fine, so you don't need toworry.

Actually, things are really going great for me, I'm really enjoying workand a part of a great situation at Nintendo®. My work has been divided upa little bit recently. And I'm sure you all know that the president Mr.Iwata has been in development for some time and last year he has beentaking a look at Nintendo®'s internal development and made some changesto our structure. We've been trying to break up the molds of all of ourproducers at Nintendo®.

We have our own internal first party development studio. We also havesecond party development studios which are games that are developedoutside of Nintendo® but published by Nintendo®. We also have gamesproduced by third parties. We've seen the number of second partydeveloped titles increase dramatically. And because of that increase insecond party development, the number of titles I was overseeing hadincreased as well. And every day I'd get countless documents on my deskthat I'd have to put my stamp of approval on just to disperse money toour second parties. [laughs] So, as of last year I have been put incharge of first party content exclusively. And that's where my focus isnow. We've also opened an EAD studio in Tokyo. That studio has beenresponsible for Donkey Kong Jungle Beat which is available for playon the show floor.

So I'm in a great environment now and have a great setup because I workdirectly with a lot of the Nintendo® DS tech demos on the show floortoday.

I am overseeing Zelda in its entirety, in a sense. Mr. Aonuma is the producer. I think that if you have questions about Zelda you should perhaps not ask me, but Mr. Aonuma.

Just very quickly though, as for the reason why Link has changed, there were very, very, very, very many people out there who wanted Link to change [laughs]. Also there's another reason and that's that in developing the Wind Waker we know that we were going to be creating a game in which Link was a young boy and trying to create a very active and very energetic young boy and trying to choose the right style for portraying the young boy in a game like that we tried many different experiments. The ultimate decision we came to was that the cel-shading in Wind Waker was the best option for expressing that. We also wanted to create a very unique game world on the GameCube.

But since then, we've been left with a very big question: and that was, what are we going to do when we decide to make Link a teenager again -- a 16-year-old Link. So after Wind Waker we tried several different models and made varied versions of them. Ultimately we decided that in showing a teenage Link really the best style of expressing him would be something that's closer to our graphical style in Ocarina of Time. So Mr. Aonuma actually wasn't lying at the Game Developer's Conference when he said we were working on Wind Waker 2. He just didn't tell the whole story. And fortunately because he didn't tell the whole story, we were able to surprise you all here with a big announcement about the series.

Eiji Aonuma: I'm sure all of you saw the video of the new Legend of Zelda game at this point. One thing that I'd like to point out to everybody is that none of that is CG. It's all done in real-time and running on the [game] engine. That movie was actually created by somebody who took a version of the game, played it, videotaped and then cut the pieces together to make the movie.

One more thing I'd like to point out. For a long time now -- ever since Ocarina of Time -- Mr. Miyamoto has talked about how he'd like Link to be able to fight on horseback so he could have mounted battle scenes with Link swinging his sword. Unfortunately we were not able to do that in the N64 games. And this time that's been a big focus for us with the new game on GameCube. So I think in that sense, the fact that we're seeing Link on horseback and swinging a sword, I think that's one more way in which Link has matured.